Friday, February 28, 2003

Sometimes, when someone is being sarcastic, they hit on something truthful.

Mike Silverman at Red Letter Day, my friend on the "rightish" side of politics, makes this sarcastic comment about a peace movement that may become more "militant".

Brian Scrivani over at Wunderkinder has a llittle contest going on to come up with the best slogan for the new, militaristic "peace" movement.

My contribution would be "I'm fighting the Jihad for Peace!"

Now, I get the joke that Mike is making here, however, I don't think the phrase "fighting the Jihad for Peace" is really a flawed one. "Jihad" as it is often understood these days is not the correct meaning of that term. It means, basically, "struggle". Fundamentalist patriarchal pricks (seriously changing their religion around in ways that fundamentalist patriarchal pricks always do in every culture that has ever exsisted) have co-opted it to represent their eternal struggle against the evil American Satan, or whatever. It's also a buzzword overused by the media to scare us. But it's not inherently a bad term. It doesn't literally mean "horrible war with lots of suicide bombings where we try to kill lots of innocent people". "Jihad for Peace" would mean, "struggle for peace". Which is a good thing, not a bad thing.

Now, I understand that I've missed the point entirely of Mike's post. I also find alot of the people in the peace movement to be useless and annoying. (Note to hippies: you can't change the world by drumming in public and waving giant puppets around. There are plenty of ways to protest a dumb war without spelling things in giant letters with your naked bodies.) I also respect him for answering this question, and for having an answer to it in the first place. Those are some nice ideas, too bad the current administration, in their complete and utterly inelegant demand for satisfaction, seems to have used up completely the UN's trust in and goodwill towards the United States that it would help to have in order to carry out those ideas. (Holy run-on sentence, Batman!)

However, I do think it's kind of funny (in an entirely respectful way) that a person who is behind a war that we're supposedly going to fight to keep the peace is annoyed at people who are saying they are fighting to keep the peace!